Searching the Wastes

The Blasted Lands, a place once teeming with life, and now filled death, minor demons and horde remnants.

The tears in reality made by the dark portal gave way for the constant flood of minor demons who would have to be cleaned every once in a while, the ogres and fel orcs would usually raid exploring parties and the spirit of the land was the closest thing to dead you could find around.

This made the shamanistic arts harder to use here, most of the spirit was either dead or deformed and scarred... that was the nature of the Fel, destruction of both body and spirit, the release of the chaotic energy bringing about death and corruption.

If the Void is tempting and something that seeks to taint, the Fel is something that seeks to destroy and corrupts by simply existing... in the same way as radiation breaks the DNA and the bodies cell, Fel hurts the spirit and body causing it to mutate.

The corruption from Void was a form of rapid mutation in a deliberate way to form a new organism, the Fel simply made all things around break, thus mutation, death and destruction.

We had been looking for Daio for some days already, he was hard to find. Due to the environment being so devastated it meant that making use of my army of elementals was way harder than before, I had to fuse many of the elements just for them to be able to barely function. Coming from the previous 500 to around 50, who we would use to scout the place.

Every time we would land to rest, groups of demons like imps and felhounds would attack us, the imps were little, horned and skinny, but also cunning in the ways they fought, as for the felhounds, the bastards were very feral and would try and drain the mana of their enemies without much regard for themselves.

Felhounds were four legged beasts, its foot were a single sharp horn, with huge frontal horns at the sides which were like pistons waiting to pierce its foes, and a very big mouth piece at its front. It has appendages on its back used to grab and rip its enemies apart, quite the vicious little creatures.

Having your mana drained was quite the painful process... it would wound both spirit and body, making so that you would even start to leak mana if drained too much. It was like having a drill into your insides that would take your spiritual blood per say.

So everytime we met these creatures we would not hold back the least, me and Selia would use timestop and slow just so they didn't have the time to use its mana drain attack.

As for the imps, they were cowardly and would disband once we killed enough of them... they would also come back once they found more fellows because they were greedy to take our mana and flesh.

Everytime we killed them I made sure to bottle some of the blood and materials which could be used as learning material for my future experiments.

While Daio was not being founded yet, we would roam and explore this inhospitable land.

-----

"You are saying they were going after Daio?" Said the archmage to the high elf mage.

"Yes, Lord Whitepike they were even stubborn about it, ignoring my warnings and advice to not seek him further... who knows what that disgraced and shame of a mage is doing in the wastes..."

"Good to know... Now go call my special unit of mages, they have two hours to get ready before we depart." Said Archmage Whitepike.

Soon a group of mages flew with gryphons in the direction of the party that left a couple hours ago, they would often attract roaming demons to the encampment of their targets.

Thankfully they maintained a distance during the day, only daring get close during the night, but their target seemed to always have left before they reached them, the most curious part was that they found the clues of dragons in their encampment, not gryphons...

-----

"That bastard is far enough from the keep already... he's gotten greedy I bet, hes getting closer and closer, last night they almost caught us before we left. Today we should kill them before they try something more dangerous than simple demons." I said to the party.

Selia was honestly quite angry at being repeatedly mana-drained at this point, so she had a resolute look of wanting to pay back at the archmage, there was also that disgusting gaze but she didn't care much about a human looking at her with such eyes... she saw that as nonexistent to even think about.

Trag was getting his fill of fights against these felhounds and also his fill of time to sort out his relationship with Mona.

She was an oddball for sure... but he also found her to be very clingy in a cute way, she would often sleep between his horns when they walked around, and during the nights she was somewhat serious in her nightwatch turn, taking the form of an owl.

She was not the talkative type, she would often express herself with her forms or physical touch.

As for him, he himself did not know why Mona liked him... he just figured it was because he looked confortable due to his animalistic traits, which concerned him more than a fair bit.

This night they prepared the ambush for the mages following them, they made sure to make it seem like they rode dragons to entice them to be more greedy... afterall if a mage has a tamed dragon he would always invite envy and greedy thoughts from others.